Liquid Mansion

© 1999 A.B. Druwelyn
All rights reserved.

The night awoke to its own consciousness.
The bag sleeves of her dress filled with wind, catching dark gusts that curved languidly off the river. Leah held her arms to either side as she walked the deserted lane of oyster shells and sand. Her skirts snapped in nightfall winds, her eyes upturned to the gaudy burgundy clouds, and she imagined soaring ravenlike beneath them. Wet shells crunched beneath her boots as the hectic noises of the Vieux Carré and its French Market died away behind her, swallowed by a mile of twilight. Many shells cupped pools of rain water that mirrored flowing wine clouds, little cameos of liquid night. Shells, she thought, once submerged in the amniotic stillness of the Gulf, plucked up to be scattered down again, submerged in their own reflections of life. She began stepping around them for fear of profaning their sky-soaked sanctity.
In a storefront she caught her reflection, bedraggled hair, an orphan's expectant eyes, skirts frayed and wet. She fought off the desire to dance with her image, for people talked enough about her as it was. Few were the cold statues in the cemeteries that had not known the warmth of her kiss; she was the girl who talked to dying fishes and crabs in the market, whispering praises to their iridescent beauty. She had to ease their pain with beauty, if only in words. "Away from my stall, little urchin!" The venders would shout. "Blowin' kisses to crabs!" Such words would follow her home and sleep with her, words such as, "The li'l wench is touched."
She looked away from her lonely reflection.
Moss-hung oaks arched away in a tunnel of dripping green over a crossroad lane, casting deep pools of shadow. She shouldn't have strayed so far from the market, she realized, where she had gone to purchase a hen. She passionately disliked carrying squawking hens, their feet tied together like a living handle—a weekly horror she always postponed.
Winds shook loose diamonds of rain as she entered the green shades of the leafy corridor, and she tried not to remember the last time she had wandered so far from the market. That strange, dreadful day....

There had been the walled cemetery of white-washed brick she'd climbed over, and the dark-skinned woman there cutting flowers—a voodooienne, her face painted white as death. The magick woman had continued harvesting from her unhallowed garden between tombs, then said without looking up, "You are she who speaks to animals, the kisser of fishes and cows, she who is drawn to my table in the market yet never approaches. You once wished to trade your necklace of shells to have your future told, oui, ma chère?"
Leah had blinked owlishly, fingering the necklace she had made from spiraling nautilus shells. So the woman was a seer, she knew such existed. She eased closer and asked, "But are you evil, as the nuns warn?"
"The only evil is inertia, and its offspring, stillborn dreams." Eyes like dark flames lifted to Leah. "You have dreams, chère. You love dance, and the dance of words, and dancing with each until the dancer becomes the dance. Give me the necklace. Only then will I say more."
Amazed at the trivial revelation, yet unafraid, Leah pulled the jangley necklace free of her head and asked, "What curious flowers are those?"
"The white is a calla. It represents the female generative; behold, its shape is very like your own little coucoune, oui? The trumpet-shaped are thorn apple, used to fetch visions beyond the present. The pink is a lotus from Asia: it embodies myst'ries beyond your comprehension. Now give me the necklace, if you would know the unknowable!"
Leah surrendered the necklace. The voodooienne nibbled a thorn apple petal, then whispered strange words and tossed all the flowers high into the air. It rained flowers. Leah smiled despite the grim atmosphere. She felt lawless in the fragrant downpour.
The painted crone examined the fallen flowers, seeing a calla atop a calla beneath a lotus. "You would enjoy the myst'ry more than the truth it conceals, chère." There was an empty moment as the woman clutched the necklace, then she spoke as if listening to many voices while struggling to control her own:
"The dreams you follow are shared by a girl awaiting you beyond them. You will find her on a strange street. She will love you, she will protect you; she will protect you from all but herself!"
Leah tugged her hair, backing away.
"You have loved and lost and found her again in other lives," the woman continued. "You will find and love her again. One look into her eyes, nothing else shall you see thereby! No land but liquid is her realm. ...There is screaming, ecstasy in her mansion. You will lose and find her yet again in another life, on another strange street. This is the never-ending dance your soul most dreads, yet craves, thus creates. You are the call of the Bacchae, and she, the answer, the grape bursting upon your tongue. The flowers weep and sing!"
Leah had turned and run, scampering over the cemetery wall.
But that afternoon was far behind her—the voodooienne's words unthreatening as forgotten summer thunder—as she continued down the unfamiliar lane beneath windy oaks.
Closely built houses and inns soon rose into the indigo sky beyond the trees, their porticos with iron lace railings overspilling sagging gray facades. She walked the salt-crusted boardwalk nearer the buildings, and an inscription carved into the cypress door of an enticingly ancient house caused her to stop, the hauntingly familiar words, LIQUID MANSION.

Dark-jutting gables shadowed from various levels of its pitched roofing, every window as dim and lifeless as the little driftwood-colored mansion. Laceries of wisteria vines tangled around the pillared portico, its lavender bouquets censing the humid shade so sweetly that Leah felt drowsy as she climbed the steps of the abandoned house. She peered into a floor-length window, yet only her reflection tarnished the darkly draped glass. Behind the house, she found a vacant coach house and a walled courtyard. She stepped through the courtyard's crooked iron gate, finding the enclosed twilight candied by banks of flowers. Climbing roses overran the garden, smothering fountains that splashed green water over frolicking nymphs and satyrs of moss-licked stone. Within the colourful bedlam a statue of Artemis crouched in eternal hunt, the marble ancient and pitted. Leah hurried over to kiss the statue's mossy mouth, then climbed atop the goddess's back, tiptoeing to look into the house through a leaded glass window.
The dim room was richly arrayed in floral brocades and tapestried fabrics, and over a hearthrug a stick, long as and ax handle, was floating in the air. Floating... Surely strings upheld it, yet she saw none. Perhaps it was bewitched. A shot of fear leapt through her.
A small but fierce female voice rose within the house:

The stick turned like a dowser's divining rod until pointing at Leah. Into her sightline there glided a petite silhouette in a dark cape, black hair rippling waist-length beneath a top hat. The girl took the stick, then bowed to an invisible crowd.
Leah thought to jump away, but that petite form, the low bow. She had seen this before, from a great distance... Outdoors, she remembered, amongst cheering. This was The Little Magician. How the crowds swelled in the river park whenever The Little Magician performed. Les petite artiste d'illusion, the Vieux Carré Voodooiennes grudgingly called the magician. The townspeople were forever speculating over who the magician was and where she was from, bewildered by her uncanny feats, as when she floated over the crowds to vanish with a flash of lightning for the finale. Leah could never afford the shows, yet always watched from high oak limbs. "'Tis Satan's own dark angel," parish priests would warn the departing crowds. "Have no traffic with it!"
Leah could no longer see the cloaked silhouette.
Piercing like a star the dusk of silence, there came the certain knowledge that she was no longer alone in the dark garden. She turned.
The Little Magician bowed to her in the courtyard shadows, hat in one hand, wavy black tresses spilling to the ground.

Leah's hands knotted in her hair as the magick girl spun her top hat and caught it atop her head.
"I was only walking by," Leah explained, "admiring the flowers."
"Admiring more than flowers." The magician walked closer.
Leah squeezed her hair as she stepped away, forgetting she was atop Artemis, then fell squealing.
The magician caught her, their faces separated by thin inches of shadow.
Leah's cheeks filled with heat.
"You are safe," the magician said. She placed a palm between Leah's breasts. "Your heart gallops. Perhaps it holds secrets that it seeks to outrun?" She slipped two fingers into the jabot of Leah's bodice, then pulled up from between her breasts something soft as flesh. A white blossom, it appeared between them as if newborn.
"For my admirer of flowers. I am Oellan."
Leah took the flower, seeking refuge in the distraction. "A flower," she said needlessly, forgetting to introduce herself.
Oellan held her until a name whispered across her consciousness. "Would you like to come inside, Leah? I have a long journey ahead, and would enjoy the company."
Leah nodded at the flower, so flustered that she didn't notice the psychic spying, and Oellan led her into the Liquid Mansion.

Oellan lighted a candle from a sconce in the back hall. The flame danced, throwing translucent shadows over the beaded ceiling as Leah followed. They entered a dim parlor where giltwood settees, carved in the heavy Viennese style, sat back in the shadows, faced by armchairs big as thrones that flanked a center table. The high walls, finished in a wraparound mural of moon-drenched magnolias, wavered in candlelight, the trees seeming to sway.
The scratch of a match and the dust-scented shadows drew back as Oellan lighted another tallow candle upon the table. Bayberries within the tallow sizzled and popped fragrantly as she blew the match flame into oblivion.
Moths flattened themselves against the window netting, looking in longingly at the flames. Oellan placed her cape over a horsehair armchair, uncovering hammered satin skirts of nocturnal purples designed for pocket hoops, but the hoops had been removed, the excess fabric draping in flouncy swags; above, the ivory dimple of her navel was exposed below a laceup bodice of burgundy rosettes studded with seed pearls that cinched the white swells of her breasts just above her nipples. She removed her hat, and the ring of candlelight cameoed a face lovelier than heaven, crueler than hell. Only the faintest of colors tinged the pearly pallor of her cheeks, her lips plump and red as a venomous flower, a slight nose up-curving between the drooping lashes of immense black eyes that mirrored every flame. A dark wing of hair dropped over one eye, making her a seductive, cruel angel.
Leah eased away from the lawless allure of those eyes, stepping on her skirts and stumbling back into one of the musty armchairs. She quickly crossed her legs decorously as she sat up.
"Make yourself comfortable," Oellan said, enjoying Leah's discomfort.
Candlelight clasped the pallid oval of Leah's face, her hair furling to her waist in champagne swirls braided with shells, bangs cropped recklessly, her dingy skirts tattered and wet—yet the ethereal Botticelli of her face, long lashes and a lush mouth, the dreaming green of her eyes like an undersea sunset. Oellan touched the downy hair above Leah's ear, where it fanned back in tiny waves from her temples, wave upon breaking wave curling into forever.
"You are lovelier than beauty imagined," Oellan said.
Leah felt flames on her cheeks—no one had ever touched her so gently, nor said such a thing to her.
"Would you like to take your clothes off?" asked Oellan.
Leah looked stricken.
"I could build a fire and hang them to dry," Oellan offered.
"... I, my heat, is drying them," Leah said. She reached to pull her hair, but stopped herself. She could look no higher than the slender stem of Oellan's neck, where she now now saw her necklace—the one she'd made of shells. It couldn't be....
Oellan's black eyes darkened to a silent accusation. "You know this necklace, Leah, how?"
Leah looked to the candle. "I ... made it."
Oellan walked to the garden window, lost in thought as the stars trembled in their places. Finally she said, "I bought this necklace from a voodoo woman in the market here. I asked her for something I didn't believe she had, I asked her for something I lost years ago, something that cannot be bought, or sold. I asked her to sell me my innocence, if she could." Oellan clutched the necklace. "She gave me this."
So confused was Leah that she felt only curiosity, as in a dream.
"Why would you seek to buy such a thing," she asked, "when 'tis the very thing I'd most quickly give for a life such as yours: piteous innocence, and the ignorance that belongs to it, for a life of pure wonder?"
Oellan moved back into the circle of candlelight. "You truly are the maker of the necklace..."
Leah nodded.
Oellan resumed tucking wisps of hair behind Leah's ear, the gesture again so natural that Oellan seemed unaware of it. Leah was aware of Oellan's eyes on her, felt that dark light following the curves of her face. She poked at the melting tallow, then spoke as if across a dream, "What is this place? What is the Liquid Mansion?"
"The Liquid Mansion is a wind-ship. We are in one of her port houses near the docks." The glittering black galaxies of Oellan's eyes gently drew Leah into their gaze, and Leah saw nothing anymore but the nocturnal wonders therein, and sensed a recognition as remote as the stars.
Oellan sat on the chair's armrest, and Leah cautiously turned her face nearer Oellan's flared cuff, inhaling the dark perfumes of countless nights at sea. She slid over to make a place for Oellan, and the girl sank into the armchair beside her, one leg beneath her so that she faced Leah. She gathered Leah's hair, combing it languidly with her fingers. Leah suffered the adoration quietly, relishing every gentle stroke, which lent her the courage to ask the frightful question that continued plaguing her:
"The stick that was floating, 'twasn't a magician's trick ... Was it?"
The distending silence carried an unspoken answer.
Leah asked, "How came you by these ... strange powers?"
Oellan recalled times she had answered such questions—sometimes the reaction was fright, often dismissive laughter—but always she had removed the memory of these conversations from those questioners. Removing memories was simple for her, and she only hesitated in answering now for wondering if she could remove any memory of herself from this girl—which would mean keeping Leah away from that truth afterward, thus away from her.
"There are spirits," Oellan replied, "both high and low in power, who can interact with the material world, and stir winds, or lift objects—"
"Ghosts," Leah interrupted.
"No, spirits older than the Earth who have never lived as mortals. They can never interact with this physical world except with the aide of one born into and skilled in the most arcane of the ancient arts."
"Arts ... Witchcraft?"
"I have met few witches who could scarce do more than extinguish a candle with a thought." Oellan gathered Leah's hair. "But there are others who have allowed the centuries to bury their memory beneath myth and legend, yet who remain very much alive, though unknown. My bloodline extends back to such an ancient coven of sorceresses who learnt ages ago that the higher spirits would attend to the greatest sorceresses: only a powerful blood sorceress could invoke and command these higher entities—at the beginning with awkward spoken commands during complex ceremonies, later telepathically without ritual, so that in effect the sorceress alone was doing great magicks ... never ostentatiously, but secretively to acquire all she desired. Yet at a price. In exchange for doing the coven's bidding, these spirits required what they still require: to occasionally revel in carnal pleasures.
"But they needed flesh-and-blood bodies for this, and a sorceress' skill to anchor them temporarily into mortal bodies. Our powers are strongest near the water element, likewise a spirit's. For these reasons the Liquid Mansion came to be. My coven entices unsuspecting men upon our ship who are later overtaken by the spirits. The spirits then enjoy the taste of wine and sumptuous foods, the feel of silk and nights of love-making with the coven, all the Earthly pleasures they cannot know in their ethereal form. The men are later left on a remote shore with no memory of this.
"And like my foremothers, I must sail the Liquid Mansion. To leave the coven would mean death." The coal-black cores of Oellan's eyes turned to smoky violet, shaded with a bruised melancholy. "Sail her, and open myself to the sensual hungers of awesome spirits."
"It seems a fable of old," said Leah, "yet I believe you. But why come here as The Little Magician?"
"Only the youngest of us can pass for a boy. I draw large crowds in many ports, where the coven gathers the men that the spirits require. We have wealth, every luxury, and the freedom of the sea, yet a freedom I dream of freeing myself from."
Leah turned to her. "Living betwixt the sea and stars. Could a life be more enchanted?"
"Mine is a life unnatural, oft undesirable."
"So you fear these spirits?"
"The only fear is theirs," said Oellan. "Without my coven they could never interact with the physical world. 'Tis simply a gypsy's life and undesirable. I have never known fear. Until now. I fear that in finding innocence I must lose it."
Leah gave her a bewildered look. "How can finding a thing mean losing it? And where is this innocence?"
Oellan's lips touched Leah's soft as moist silk, lingering there several heartbeats longer than decorum allowed, composing a requiem of sensation. Leah's eyes closed in a confusion of ecstasy, the birth of desire lifting like a secret star behind her heart. She felt herself dissolving within the fragrant garden of flesh just as their mouths untangled, and Oellan said:
""This, I fear this, the thing I most desire: you, innocence, because to take either is to destroy both. You must go. The ship comes for me."
She prepared to take from Leah the memory of their conversation, yet Leah interrupted:
"This flower you gave me, had it been left uncut, 'twould still have faded and died, unloved." Leah hesitated, hearing a distant voice from the past: the flowers weep and sing! "...So its greater happiness came in its cutting. Death would be its end regardless, yet now it has known love. Now it is immortal."
A drop of heavy silence fell between them.
"And you crave such a cut?" Oellan asked.
"I crave the cutter, thus am already cut. If you must go, so must I, with you."
The creaking of mule harnesses and the rattle of a carriage passed. "Think on this more once your head and heart have cooled," said Oellan. "Go, and tell no one the things I revealed. At midnight, if your heart is still so hot with certainty, return. A footpath behind this house leads to a pier, there are lanterns there. If a blue lamp burns I will come for you. Yet think deeply. Never will your former life be part of you thereafter. Though we will be together, at times you will be the plaything of unearthly spirits and my coven, and to forsake either would mean certain death."
"The lantern will burn," said Leah. "To leave it unlit would mean a death far more certain."
The blue soul of the candle flame imbedded in Oellan's eyes as she spoke quietly, "How immortal the nature of mortals' follies..."
Her uplifting hands opened. A snap like an electric arc singed the air as the doors flew open, dark winds gusting in to snatch the light from the candles.
The room filled with shadows.
Distant gas lamps of Nouvelle Orleans glowed in, revealing that Leah sat alone in the room.
She grew silent within herself as the night gathered around her, and she began to fear that she had imagined Oellan. This fear carried with it remembered voices of the townspeople: The little wench is touched.
Her eyes moved over the dark table, focusing as if upon the silhouette of a dream. She lifted the silk top hat, then pressed her face into its petal-soft interior.
She inhaled Oellan's scent, and there came the knowledge of all her necklace had embodied, and that it had never been hers to keep, only to give, and in giving find again, like her love: for both now awaited her within a destiny all her own.

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